NowNS: First Nations offer economic hope

Lower median age of Mi’kmaq population contributes to employment upswing

Drummer Austin Christmas leads a family violence preventation march in Membertou last winter. The welder started his own plumbing business, which now has three employees. (STAFF / File)

This article is part of The Chronicle Herald's Now! Nova Scotia series, which examines — in the wake of the Ivany report — the challenges and opportunities faced by our province in today's economy.

Like many of us, Austin Christmas followed the smell of money to the Alberta oilpatch.

And like so many Nova Scotians, the journeyman welder quickly grew weary of the whole thing — the endless travel back and forth from his home in the Mi’kmaq First Nation community of Membertou, the heart-breaking goodbyes to his two children and all the other woeful aspects of the life of the long commute.

So after six years, he gave it up, even though it meant he had to find a new way to make a living.

Fortunately, he had a plan. Before getting his welder’s papers, he’d spent some time in the pipe trades, ensuring that he already qualified for the first stage in his apprenticeship as a plumber, which he completed in the months that followed at Nova Scotia Community College’s Sydney campus.

“The first years in any business are hard,” says Christmas, 40.

But with three employees, his plumbing business may be over the hump.

From its start eight years ago, Austin Christmas Plumbing and Heating got plenty of work in vibrant Membertou. Now, after depending entirely on customers at home, some 30 per cent of his business is from off-reserve customers, a number he expects to grow.

All of which makes him exactly the kind of person Ray Ivany’s Now Or Never report on the future of the Nova Scotia economy had in mind when it talked about reducing the wide gap between the unemployment rate for First Nations and African-Nova Scotian residents and everyone else in the province.

There’s another reason why the success of folks like Christmas is good news. The population of Nova Scotia, as we all know, is aging faster than just about anywhere in the country.

First Nations communities in Nova Scotia, on the other hand, are experiencing the same baby boom as reserves elsewhere in Canada.

The upshot: The median age of the First Nations population in Nova Scotia is 25.4 years, compared with 41.6 for the population of the province as a whole.

There, at least in part, seems to be an answer to the province’s aging demographic.

The corollary is also true: If they’re going to stay around, these young people need to find meaningful, decently compensated work.

There is the challenge. Official sources put the unemployment rate for people living on reserve at about 25 per cent, and some 15 per cent for aboriginal Nova Scotians no matter where in the province they live.

That’s far too rosy a picture, according to Robert Bernard, president of Diversity Management Group, a Mi’kmaq consulting group in Cape Breton’s We’koqma’q First Nation. He puts the First Nations unemployment rate in some communities as high as 75 per cent. The frightening thing is it used to be worse.

He means back in the days before the federal government launched a growing list of inclusion initiatives, and First Nations like Membertou, which boasts a convention centre, as well as its own insurance and fishing companies, and Millbrook, to a lesser degree, became employment powerhouses.

The situation was driven home to him 18 years ago when he was hired to get more aboriginal workers involved in the Sable natural gas project.

“We were way behind in terms of training and qualifications. We realized that right away,” says Bernard.

It didn’t help that some of the bigger companies he was dealing with placed a higher priority on creating an efficient project than bettering the community’s employment prospects.

Things have changed enough that the Ulnooweg Development Group Inc., which provides loans and business services to First Nations entrepreneurs, lists 70 Nova Scotia companies on its Atlantic aboriginal business directory.

Barry Stevens, who has a high-tech consulting firm in Chester, says First Nations companies are judged the same as any other small business: “On value.”

Everybody agrees there’s a long way to go until First Nations businesses can hire all the young flooding onto the job market in their communities, let alone bring expatriates back home.

Christmas says what’s most needed is a change in attitude. He says non-natives will, by and large, now hire whoever can do the work.

“We need to create more of an awareness that there are opportunities away from the community, and you don’t have to leave your community to go and get them.”

For Bernard, it’s all about the basics: educating and training the young so they can do the jobs of the future, and creating a structure that ensures the funding dollars and jobs flow beyond band-owned enterprises to small businesses.

Stevens would like to see more development for aboriginal businesses so they can insert themselves into the supply chains on big projects like the Irving frigate program in Halifax.